How to Run a Cleaning Business the C.L.N Way

August 17, 2015

0

0

ByMike

How to Run a Cleaning Business

Is your cleaning company making you miserable? You need to know how to run a cleaning business AND still love your life while getting the fulfillment, financial freedom and lifestyle freedom that you sought when you started out? Maybe you started out just looking to make ends meet, but have secretly hoped for more- more recognition, more money, more impact…

If none of this sounds familiar and you and your business are living happily ever after, this blog may be a colossal waste of your time. On the other hand, if those questions got you fired up and your heart pumpin, you just might be in the right place…

It is one thing to work hard and make money…It’s another to be lazy and broke…

But there is no excuse for working your tail off and and not getting the financial rewards you deserve because you DON’T know how to run a cleaning business!

The reason you aren’t getting the results you want is often because you don’t have clear, written goals. Even if you do have written goals, they are usually WHAT based and impotent like these…

I want to double my business

I don’t want to stress over bills

I only want to work 40 hours/ week

Nothin’ wrong with those goals, but they are missing a key ingredient to give them power…

Your WHY.

I consult with owners of cleaning companies day in and day out. The examples above are what business owners just like you tell me they want every day.

When I dig a little further (this is why I get paid the big bucks) they don’t really want to grow their business, or work less. What they (and probably you) truly want are things like:

Time freedom

Ability to provide and care for their spouse and kids

Respect from their community and family

Do you see the difference in power between the first and second set of examples above? The first set of bullet points are wishy washy wants that won’t get you fired up to do what needs to be done, but the second set of bullet points are the kind of things you would walk through a plate glass window for.

As more and more clients confided in me with their true desires, I realized, you really don’t want a cleaning business, you want a clean (C.L.N.) business.

See what I did there… Wordplay.

C- Creative

L- Lucrative

N– Not Stressful

Without further ado, let’s jump into the CLN way to run a cleaning business

Creative

Surprise!! The last thing you probably associate with owning a cleaning company is creativity, but that is part of the reason it can be so transformational.

First, let’s build a quick foundation.

First and foremost, you are an entrepreneur

You are owner of a cleaning company second

Your business thrives on creativity and needs it to grow, but before we talk about your business, let’s talk about YOU. You need to be creative. It is fun, energy giving, not to mention profitable.

BONUS LOVE: Often times when you don’t have cash, you can get the job done (often better) using creativity instead.

HINT: There are at least 3 amazing examples of this in this very blog…

You as a human being will be healthier, happier and wealthier with some creativity in your life.

You didn’t get into this business with the hopes and dreams of slogging through mundane tasks like customer complaints, payroll, bidding, vacuum repair and every other monotonous thing that fills your day.

You don’t have to resign yourself to being just a cleaner or even the owner of your cleaning business.

You are an entrepreneur.

Every day you have the opportunity to flex your mental muscles and squeeze out creativity.

Set aside time 2-3 times/ week to BE CREATIVE:

Take a walk or jog

Listen to some classical music

Arm wrestle kindergartners

Consider using your first creativity session to creatively think of things you can do in the future that make you feel creative. Pretty meta huh…

BONUS LOVE: If you are one of the few that think you are “just not that creative”, borrow other people’s creative ideas you find in books, articles and blogs

As the leader of your company- whether you have 1 employee or 100, it is your job to set the course, cast your vision and determine how you will get there and what rules and values you will use to guide your way.

Enough Kum By YA- let’s dive into the nuts and bolts of what a solid creative business looks like…

You know that getting and keeping good staff is one of the biggest challenges owners of cleaning companies struggle with. Here is a fine example of how to use some creativity in your on boarding process:

Typical first day for a cleaner:

New employee arrives, no one is ready.

New employee is herded into a small room and given a stack of boring paperwork to fill out.

New employee is sent out to clean and is told to just do what Bob does

New employee goes home, kicks the dog (don’t you feel guilty), and tells his wife his new job is just like his last crappy gig

With even the tiniest bit of creativity, you can stand out from the crowd and eliminate so much of the price resistance/ competitive bidding that is the woe of the cleaning industry.

For example- do you have a referral program? Is it awesome? Try a couple of these creative ideas on for size:

Run referral contests- award your Referrer of the year something awesome like a cruise.

Have quarterly parties just for referrers and referees.

Bring homemade cookies to anyone who refers you to an account.

See how many referrals you can GIVE to your customers and even prospects

Reward and recognize employees who ask for and get referrals

Automate requesting referrals into your business- on every bid, email signature, and invoice

Referrals alone can explode your business, and I don’t want to short change you. So if you want more I go into depth in my ebook 5 Steps to DOUBLE Your Cleaning Business, you can download it for free HERE.

I have a friend who has an amazing cleaning business that couldn’t afford to give Christmas gifts his first couple of years in business so he went to every single client and gave them a Christmas hug. People remembered that for years and would still request their Christmas hug when he was able to buy nice presents for them!!

BONUS LOVE: Don’t send Christmas cards (everyone else is and yours gets lost in the pile) send Kwanzaa cards or St. Swithens Day cards (I think I made that one up). Make up a Holiday for yourself and send National Give Your Cleaner a Raise cards.

Use this creativity to Surprise and Delight your customers. If you are a big reader (you should be) send them the latest business book that you read.

SHAMELESS PLUG: Try my book on for size- it’s awesome! You and your customers will dig it get it HERE

If you are not a big reader here are some other surprise and delight ideas:

Alcohol (always a fan favorite)

Food stuffs (homemade is always better),

Ball game tickets

Any articles you find on them (HINT: use google alerts to keep track of your top customers)

Birthday cards

Anniversary cards (1 year after they become clients)

An article you find on the internet that might bring value to them

The idea is to make them feel special! Have an annual award ceremonies and give your customers, prospects and employees awards:

Customers

Quickest to pay bills

Best referrer

Best looking employees

Prospects

The one that got away (for the bid you gave and really wanted and didn’t get)

The stubbornness award (for the prospect that won’t let you give a bid)

Best dressed

Employees

Best attitude

Funniest

Customer Favorite

Host “Bring a friend lunch and learns” and invite your best customers, prospects who invite other people who could use your services. Get a private room at a restaurant. You can usually get the room for free if you buy a minimum amount of food (usually $200-$500)

You can even get a cool easy to set up red carpet style backdrop with your logo on it for a couple hundred dollars. Set that up at every event and take pictures of your customers in front of the back drop- makes them feel special and is also a great time to film testimonials.

A single event could get you 5-6 video testimonials and new customers- not to mention your new customers will love you. Video the whole event including the testimonials and edit it down to a fun sizzle reel that will entice other customers and prospects to come to future events.

BONUS LOVE: Can’t afford an event? Be creative. Find someone else who wants to sell to your customer base or a vendor you spend a lot of money with and have them sponsor the event. They pay for everything, you set it up and you share the glory!!

Let’s look at creativity and your sales process. Most cleaners wait for the phone to ring (a cardinal sin) and when the phone does ring, they go out, give a bid, plays hide and seek with the prospect (you seek, they hide) until they get too busy and move on to the next fire.

Offer the first 1-3 cleanings for free (often customers will take the higher bid if the first cleaning is free)

Before you give the bid ask if they will do an exit interview for you if you don’t get the bid telling you what you could have done to earn their business

Drop them into a systematized communication funnel that includes:

Emails

Monthly newsletters

Event invites

Birthday cards

Be creative with the bid itself, don’t just give them a stack of 11 pages of small boring type and a monthly price. Create an entire welcome package (assume the sale) that has hats and t shirts with your logos on it, your favorite business book, a consumer alert with the top 10 criteria your cleaners must meet, take a picture of you with your customer that you took on the initial appointment in a frame with the bid.

Right off the bat this lets them know that you are not just another cleaner and their experience with you is going to be extraordinary!

There are 1,000 ways to skin this cat (no cats were harmed in the making of this blog) but the thing is to take a break and give yourself permission to have some fun and be creative- it’s good for you, good for your employees and good for the world at large!!

Lucrative

This one as it is a bit more self explanatory- but oh so crucial…

One of the main roadblocks between cleaners and a lucrative business is that they think, talk and SELL on price- namely that they are the cheapest price. UGH. Don’t fall for this trap

KEY POINT: Base everything you do on increasing the value to your client- not lowering the price of your service.

It is nearly impossible to be the cheapest guy out there, someone will always be willing to work for virtually nothing and undercut you, even though they will probably be out of business in short order, a new one will spring right up.

When you fight the losing battle of lowest price you don’t starve yourself of the financial resources to provide the rockstar value that your customer wants and will pay for.

Focus on attracting (through proper marketing messaging), clients that understand and value what you bring to the table.

BONUS LOVE: If you aren’t THE LOWEST price, there is no value in being second lowest- price shoppers will always take the cheapest- so you might as well be the highest and offer amazing service and make some money while you are at it!

If you do get bids by being the lowest price, you are always vulnerable to losing the account, any Tom Dick or Harry that is willing to do it for a couple shekels less will take your job in the blink of an eye. It’s a race to the bottom, to see who can make the LEAST money doing that job. It’s a game you can’t win so why play?

Before you scream to the heavens how every single customer ONLY cares about price and there is no way you can be the most expensive, let me give you a couple of nuggets to help you in your thinking:

The more you charge, the more money you have to create an amazing customer experience. One that your competitors can’t compete with.

The more you charge, the more you can spend to acquire a customer (HINT: Whoever can spend the MOST to acquire a customer WINS).

If everyone ONLY cared about price, there would be no such thing as Lexus, only Hyundai- and the good folks at Lamborghini would be right out!!

If EVERY ONE of your customers really does base their decisions solely on price- switch customers, find a niche that isn’t as price sensitive.

If you aren’t getting the prices you want. Find a niche. When you advertise specifically to Restaurants or Car Dealers or Funeral Homes or Million Dollar residences- you can speak to and serve their specific needs that they feel are unique to their unique needs. Find a couple of creative ways to distinguish yourself and your services in such a way that delivers high perceived and actual value to your niche(s). Once you do this price becomes far less relevant.

The fact of the matter is- the low bid is not chosen every time. Movin on…

Not Stressful

When I really press owners on what they really want and why they want it- they don’t want to deal with the stress. The beauty of a CLN business is all 3 steps work together. Being Creative is a stress reliever and makes you more Lucrative and profit is the ultimate stress reliever in business.

BONUS: If you have a problem that requires money and you have money- you don’t have a problem

Once you are creative and lucrative, there are only two other things keeping you from living the life you want with your business:

Not enough hours in the day

Always putting out fires

Now that we have identified the poison- what’s the antidote?

Systems

Stay with me for a moment and let’s think this through…

Why aren’t there enough hours in the day?

Because there is too much to do.

Can’t you hire people to do these things?

Yeah, but I can’t trust my people to do the things I do.

Bingo.

You can’t trust your people to “handle” things so you end up doing everything- including the life sucking tasks that you hate. What you are really saying is you want things done a certain way…your way… the RIGHT way. You have a checklist in your mind, a decision making flow in your brain when you attempt to do something… anything…

The way you think things through is different than the way your employees think things through so you don’t trust them. Often for good reason.

What if there was some magical way that you could communicate all of the fine decision making skills rolling around in your mind grapes with someone else so they could make decisions like you make decisions??

That way exists my friend and it is called a written system. That is the good news.

The bad news is that often it is easier to just do it yourself than to expend the brainpower to think through exactly what you do and write it down in a simple and easy to understand manner.

It may be more work to create that system today, but once you have created it, a single system can save you untold hours and dollars and STRESS.

Here are some things that magically appear when you create a system

You become less dependent on “star” employees ability to make decisions because you have made all of the decisions in advance

Decisions are made before there is an issue, in a relaxed creative setting, not in emergency mode when you are dealing with a fire

When you take the time to write out your system, you often find room for improvement over what YOU have been doing and your company gets that much better

Quality and the ability to execute gets much more consistent

Less fires to put out

Less stress when you have fires because there is already a plan in place to deal with them

Customers and employees notice you have your crap together and it becomes easier to attract both

BONUS LOVE: If and when you sell your business systems and an immaculate set of books will get you TOP DOLLAR and can be the difference between a six figure and seven figure payday

Once you build systems for every job that you do- you are no longer needed, you just:

Put people in place (there is a system for that)

Train them on your company’s systems (you KNOW there is a system for that)

And you good sir (or ma’am) are effectively retired.

What’s that? You don’t want to retire? No problem, you have the option of taking your business to the next level and to just do the things that you want to do instead of everything you are afraid to let anyone else do.

If you are as fired up as I am on getting all this done, but feel like a lonely (albeit long) blog post isn’t going to do the trick, you are in luck. If you would like to apply for a one on one strategy session email support@growmycleaningcompany.com with your details and we will call you to discuss.

Mike

Knower of All Things Cleaning/ Business

P.S. If you haven’t downloaded your free copy of 5 Steps to Double Your Cleaning Business after reading all this businessy goodness, it is a sad day indeed. Fix that and download it HERE.